TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Monday, July 30, 2012

BOOK NOTE: “The Communist” (plus social justice and “The Death of Liberalism”)

The great danger in declaring that
THE PRESIDENT IS A COMMUNIST is that most people will either think you’re
crying wolf or think “Well, obviously” because they’re the sort of people who
are themselves prone to crying wolf.

Complicating matters, American
liberals and leftists have, for over a half century now, perfected a form of
popular doublethink whereby they spend half their time lauding people for their
commitment to socialism and the other half of their time denying that there are
any socialists. Blame Joseph McCarthy, I
suppose.

I suppose I got a small taste of this
when I went to a Christmas party at Communist Party USA headquarters, which is
right here in New York City (West 23rd Street, in fact). For miles around us, there were well-meaning
liberals who no doubt would call me insane for saying Obama is a socialist, as
well-trained liberals are supposed to do – yet at CPUSA HQ, they were
explicitly celebrating in part because they recognize Obama as (at least in a
sympathetic sense) one of their own.

But Paul Kengor’s surprisingly
balanced and straightforward (and thanks to publisher Glenn Beck, popular) book
The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The
Untold Story does not in fact assert that Obama is a communist, nor
even a socialist. Kengor is keen to
avoid the Jerome Corsi route of making each factoid a tool of attack and shows
some genuine sympathy for his subjects.
(In truth, I assume that anyone who reaches the office of the presidency
must in some sense be an amorphous, moderate gasbag in order to survive and at
least ostensibly represent a majority of the populace, whether his
philosophical roots were left-wing or right-wing.)

But the book documents in exquisite
detail the fact that Obama’s elderly political mentor when he was a teenager in
Hawaii, Frank Davis, was not merely a socialist but a literal, full-fledged
Communist Party USA member – card-carrying, Stalin-defending, the whole nine
yards – and that Obama would later refer repeatedly to the man as a sort of
guiding figure in his mind (even while Obama delicately avoided naming Davis in
those places where he was praised in Dreams
from My Father).

Of course, as a survivor of left-wing
Brown University, I would have to be at least a little wary of Ivy Leaguer
Obama, even if he had never written anything besides this passage:

To
avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural
feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

They just don’t have anything
particularly negative to say about Communism and feel compelled to spring to
its defense – a bit like a charming Alternet editor and Huffington Post
contributor I met at a Naomi Wolf-hosted event a few weeks ago, who bristled at
hearing “fascism or socialism” uttered in the same breath and was armed with
some anecdote about the Communist Party building some nice housing in part of
Eastern Europe or something. Similarly,
if you ask Nation editor Katrina
vanden Heuvel why the Soviet Union collapsed and listen carefully, you’ll
notice she seems to blame all those (ungrateful) seceding republics for causing
the economy to fall apart, instead of the other way around.

•••

But none dare call these people
Communists, of course. They’re Progressives, dammit, which is also
Hillary Clinton’s preferred self-descriptor – not “liberal.” Perhaps she just calculates that “liberal”
sounds too left-wing in modern parlance.
But

maybe she dislikes it for exactly the opposite reason – that it
still carries a whiff of its older, more libertarian, more individualist
meaning in some quarters.

I honestly try not to get too bogged
down in mere labels, though. Politics
should not be a game of “tag” where once you can attach some name (or
out-of-context quote) to someone, you win, or at least bounce the rhetorical
ball back into their court. There are
serious policy questions to be decided.

Let us be grateful, though, that
Frank Davis is not deciding them (or at least not directly). From a segment of the left that the NAACP
repeatedly had to denounce and distance itself from for its covert pro-Moscow
manipulations, Davis stood with the likes of Paul Robeson, a lifelong
Stalinist, and Langston Hughes, who urged the hoisting of the Red flag over
American and said, “The USA when we take control will be the USSA” (and in
poetry praised “A real guy named Marx, Communism, Lenin, Peasant, Stalin,
worker, me”). Nothing all that subtle or
secret about twentieth-century American communism, aside from the fact that a
couple generations of liberals have trained us all to ignore it – and, even
more strategically significant, to denounce viciously any conservative who
mentions it.

As Kengor recounts, even Soviet
officials themselves were amused and slightly baffled by the eagerness of
American liberals to play the role of Soviet apologists. But history is complex, and prior to FDR,
Davis – like the NAACP and American blacks generally – often preferred Republicans
(the party of Lincoln) to Democrats (the party of explicitly racist
eugenics-supporters like Woodrow Wilson).
He always took his real cues from Moscow, though, even dutifully
supporting the Hitler-Stalin Pact that carved up Poland while that was in
effect and railing against FDR as an anti-German warmonger.

(Kengor notes in passing numerous
other figures who were overtly Communist then and are praised by Progressives
as mainstream heroes today, such as Communist union activist Harry Bridges,
praised by Nancy Pelosi, who said, “Today we can all hold our heads high and be
proud of Harry Bridges’ legacy.”)

By 1950, long after the Hitler-Stalin
Pact collapsed but also several years after the U.S.’s wartime alliance with
Russia had ended, Davis would be denouncing Truman as himself a fascist and
pioneering the tactic of declaring any opposition to the left a form of covert
racism. At about the same time, numerous
duped Hollywood celebrities would spring to the defense of any and all accused
Communists, defending them in the name of a First Amendment that many of those
accused wanted to eliminate once their very real handlers back in Moscow took
over the U.S.

As Kengor notes, when Humphrey Bogart
realized he was in some cases defending the honor of real, paid Soviet agents
in Hollywood, he snapped, “You f---ers sold me out!”

•••

As mainstream enthusiasm for
Communism waned, Davis and allies would pursue a conscious policy of stealthily
infiltrating the Democratic Party – and a surprising number of Obama advisors
including David Axelrod come from multi-generational families of these
Progressive and once overtly Moscow-allied leftists (even Moscow-visiting, in
the case of the Axelrod family).

Decades later, all of this
translated into a notoriously father-figure-craving teenager in Hawaii seeing
an elderly Davis as a mentor figure, and according to a few comrades who
remember Obama from college, may have contributed to an impressionable future
president being so hardcore a Marxist-Leninist circa his freshman year in 1981
that he would argue forcefully against those who believed a real Communist
revolution was not imminent.

Of course, the 80s was a time of
bourgeoning ethnic identity politics on Ivy League campuses, and Obama may
quite understandably have been more interested in racially-conscious mentors
than in abolishing property rights per se.
From all three of his parents, as well as Davis, he might well have
absorbed an anti-imperialist mindset (Davis hated Winston Churchill, as did
Obama’s biological father, and there’s no denying Churchill was an
arch-imperialist) even without caring too much about economic details.

Indeed, maybe we’d be better off
right now if he had cared more about
economics. I suspect sometimes that
Obama doesn’t really care about the economy, not in any substantially material sense. A true child of 80s Ivy League activism, he
may see all of economic reality as symbolic.
If he can deal what he sees as an inherently righteous blow against the
economic elites – if he changes the “power relationships” he sees permeating
society – then maybe mundane things like the amount of goods produced, the
number of mouths fed, the number of jobs created, are trivial.

In that sense, he may still think, or
feel at heart, a bit like a change-desiring, crusading Progressive or Communist
(indeed, more like the idealistic American kind than the more plentiful, bureaucratic,
and disillusioned Soviet kind), with a purifying mission that renders messy
real-world consequences irrelevant. He
may be, on some level, a conviction politician of the worst kind, and I suspect
nothing will ever make him worry that he might be wrong, which is why he
projects that weird combination of icy confidence and slight detachment from
reality.

(And what did he mean when he told Medvedev he’d be able to act with greater
flexibility after the election? I
suppose it may have been completely harmless.)

Maybe Republicans aren’t the
only ones who should be worried about Obama.
Maybe he cares as little about the mainstream core of the Democratic
Party as he does the GOP. He has a
different sort of mission than the Democrats as a whole do.

•••

As an aside, Kengor notes that
“social justice” – particularly for the oft-overlooked but very influential
religious left – was the deliberately-vague
slogan by which Progressives lured mainstream liberals toward socialism. I would hate to see the same pattern
unwittingly repeated among libertarians by the BleedingHeartLibertarians
crowd. They get very annoyed if you
accuse them of having mere PR as an endgame, but if that’s not it, perhaps we
should be even more worried.

Seriously, though, if even
libertarians begin to treat the language of free markets as boring – and then
leapfrog over the language of mainstream liberalism to adopt “social justice”
rhetoric with a very unpleasant and socialistic history – aren’t we all in some
danger of repeating the original, late nineteenth-century decay of
market-oriented thinking into social-democratic thinking? Are the liberal-tarians trying to confirm the fears of some conservatives that liberalism
inevitably decays into left-liberalism, mere individualism into
welfare-statism?

Well, on the bright side, if the
state one day announces that all intellectuals must proffer pro-government
arguments, the BHL crowd will be ready when other libertarians are not.

•••

Charles C. Johnson, the Andrew
Breitbart of the rising generation, gave me a copy of R. Emmett Tyrrell’s TheDeath
of Liberalism, a shorter, slighter, more free-associative book than
Kengor’s, sort of a rant about anything and everything that’s wrong with modern
liberalism – Obama on one page and Ted Kennedy on the next, etc., with all
left-wing principles supposedly sputtering to their death in the failed
presidency of Obama.

The book does provide some
interesting historical reminders of things like the circa-1950s conflict
between Americans for Democratic Action (which was fairly moderate and
pro-union) and outright communist sympathizers like those influenced by former
FDR v.p. Henry Wallace (some of them Davis allies).

As Chris Hedges, author of the
similarly-titled but left-wing book Death of the Liberal Class (about
which I blogged a year ago) might lament, the more moderate liberals won in
that clash – but a later, circa-1970 conflict ended with moderates and the New
Left merging, and the rest is goofy,
sometimes incoherent history.

We are a product of countless strands
of historical influence, and which ones are looked upon as causally significant
sometimes simply hinges on what we expect to happen next. If the next four years bring no big
surprises, the stranger elements of the American left may seem like
minutiae. If the whole economy
collapses, we may find ourselves wondering why we didn’t see this coming for a
hundred years.

Speaking of which: tomorrow would
have been Milton Friedman’s hundredth birthday, so I will blog of him then.